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No More Genocide

Strategies for Conflict Resolution in the Post Cold-War World

John Shattuck

John Shattuck

In our own hemisphere, almost all the military dictatorships that caused such deep human suffering have been swept away by civilian democratic governments. Despite continuing major human rights abuses and setbacks in countries such as Peru and Colombia, the conflicts in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay are all now settled by the ballot box rather than through resort to arms. In Guatemala, the process of national reconciliation just reached a milestone with the signature of the final peace accord last December, putting an end to the longest running armed conflict and human rights nightmare in our hemisphere. The democratic process in Haiti that was restored with the return of President Aristide also reached a landmark last year with a peaceful transfer of presidential power through elections.

In Africa, the horrors of Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and the Sudan should not obscure the fact that the curse of apartheid has been removed from South Africa and that a large number of African countries are now making substantial democratic strides. Peace, albeit precarious, has returned to Mozambique and Angola after decades of civil war. A prominent expert on Africa summed up the trend this way: "There has been less and less support for single-party systems over the past few years. These are no longer seen as legitimate mechanisms of authority. People want democracy."

In Asia, we have seen democratic revolution in the Philippines, elections in Cambodia and Mongolia, and the emergence of pluralist politics in Taiwan and South Korea. Although the process has far to go, political reform has begun in Vietnam. China is a huge question mark but, even there, despite the severe regression of dissent, China's growing economic openness and halting engagement with the international community offer some hope over the long term for peaceful democratic change.

Forces Of Disintegration

There is another, darker way of looking at the post-Cold War world. What we see through this darker lens may drive us to conclude that the positive trend I have just outlined is no more than wishful thinking, and that far from witnessing the end of history, as Fukuyama would have it, we are watching an ever-accelerating repetition of the horrors of the past.

Indeed, our world seems at times to be both falling apart and coming together, as forces of integration in communications, commerce, transportation, and finance--that welter of phenomena we call "globalization"--are met by forces of disintegration in the re-emerging ethnic and religious conflicts we see throughout the post-Cold War world. These two sets of forces are to some extent related: People who see themselves thrown into dizzying and disoriented change have often sought refuge from an uncertain future in their national or ethnic or religious identity, and they have too often been spurred on to violence by cynical political leaders seeking to enhance their power by exploiting insecurity and fanning the flames of conflict.

Observers such as Samuel Huntington have gone so far as to assert that increasing conflict both within countries and among "civilizations" will be the defining characteristic of future world politics. Huntington argues that not only has history not ended, but we are left today with nothing but history and that historical tides of conflicting culture, religion, and ethnicity, which we cannot hope to control, will increasingly hold sway over international relations.

I do not subscribe to the Huntington thesis, but it is undeniably the case that the end of the Cold War and the discrediting of authoritarian structures has presented us with a witches' brew of problems involving ethnic, religious, and other forms of group conflict. Typically, these situations involve extreme nationalism, weak or corrupt government institutions, and the absence of a strong civil society and legal institutions capable of making power accountable. In some cases, the explosive combination of rampant population growth and resource depletion are also among the root causes of instability. In Bosnia and Rwanda we have seen most graphically where all of this can lead--to massive crimes against humanity, and then the last stop, genocide.

We have seen that modern genocide of as many as a million people can occur in just a few weeks, as it did in Rwanda. We have seen the enduring misery of the refugee camps, and the political consequences that are now being played out in the crisis wracking Zaire. We have seen genocide in the heart of Europe, in Bosnia, made all the more ghastly by the destruction of the multicultural civilization symbolized by Sarajevo and the bridge at Mostar. And we have seen other, perhaps not genocidal, but deeply disturbing ethnic and religious conflicts--in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Chechnya, in Afghanistan, in Northern Ireland, in Liberia, in East Timor, and in Tibet, to name but a few.

Even where conflicts have stopped short of genocide, we have seen the phenomenon of states where governmental authority is either so weak or so discredited as to result in a condition of virtual anarchy. Somalia and Liberia were harbingers of this trend, but today we see the same thing in Albania where, in the aftermath of election irregularities and the failure of a pyramid investment scheme that had received tacit government support, citizens began arming themselves by looting abandoned armories. In Colombia we have seen paramilitary forces accountable to no one become a major political factor and a source of terror. In Russia we have seen the emergence of powerful business mafias that have become a law unto themselves.

One of the most disturbing aspects of all the post-Cold War conflicts is that they are directed primarily against civilians who have no defense other that the principles of international law. The most tangible reminder of this vulnerability is the daily presence on our television screens of desperate refugee camps and caravans. The march of some 1.3 million refugees from eastern Zaire and Tanzania back to Rwanda is still fresh in our minds, but we should not forget that by some estimates over 200,000 refugees still remain in Zaire. The long columns of refugees moving across borders is graphic evidence that how a government treats its own people is not simply an internal matter, but can affect a whole region, and even a whole continent.

These problems defy easy solutions, but, clearly, a coherent approach is urgently needed for dealing with them. We need to put together realistic, workable, sustainable strategies that will build on and consolidate the democratic revolutions of recent years, and develop new mechanisms to contain and resolve the conflicts which threaten to reverse these gains as we enter a new phase of history. The vision of states bound by law and respect for human rights, and held accountable to their people and to the international community is a credible objective around which we should rally to begin to address the catastrophic problems we are seeing in the post-Cold War world.

In policy terms, we are beginning, and I emphasize, just beginning, to understand how to create and use new tools to develop a strategy for handling regional conflicts. There are three broad elements of this evolving strategy: First, early warning and prevention; second, active intervention; and third, justice and the rule of law. These three elements correspond to different stages in the development and resolution of post-Cold War conflicts. Let us examine each one in turn.

Early Warning & Prevention

How can we work to prevent the outbreak or recurrence of violent conflicts? The starting point must be early warning and preventive diplomacy. Human rights and refugee relief missions have often proved to be reliable bearers of early warning. Over the past four years, we have begun to institutionalize this capability through two key UN institutions: the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which was created in 1993; and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which has been significantly expanded in scope since 1993. The two High Commissioners have established major field operations and early warning systems in Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Georgia, Colombia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Haiti, Guatamala, and elsewhere--including in some cases a large corps of human rights and refugee monitors. In Eastern Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE's) High Commissioner for National Minorities has played a similar role.

Once forewarned of the possibility of conflict, preventive diplomacy can take a number of forms. Measures like visa restrictions, arms restrictions, denial of access to international organizations, and economic sanctions can be deployed where appropriate to contain a conflict or punish the leaders who are stimulating it. For example, the US government is working with regional or international coalitions to apply measures such as these against the governments of Nigeria, Burma, Iran, and Iraq because of the abuses they have inflicted on their own people. The great success story in this area, of course, is South Africa, where concerted international pressure contributed to the internal resolution of one of this century's most explosive racial conflicts.

In some cases, we have engaged in efforts at mediating or defusing impending conflict. This has involved the deployment of multilateral missions, not only through the UN, but also through regional organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and the OSCE. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Haiti the UN has teamed up with the OAS to mount effective human rights field missions that have helped stabilize local areas where the abuses were worst.

Preventive diplomacy has often registered successes that have gone unreported. For instance, in Estonia, a strong OSCE effort created a series of local open forums that brought ethnic Estonians together with ethnic Russians and effectively defused the potential of ethnic conflict that existed in the years immediately following the breakup of the Soviet Union. This effort was backed by US diplomacy, particularly the work of my colleague Bob Frasure, who later gave his life trying to make peace in Bosnia.

Closely related to these post-Cold War tools of preventive diplomacy are new efforts to promote stronger civil-military relations in countries with histories of human rights abuse by the military. Throughout, Latin American military leadership is being brought under civilian democratic control. As part of this effort the United States is now requiring the vetting of military leadership to screen out human rights abusers as a condition of providing US military training or assistance.

Finally, a creative new tool of preventive diplomacy is the media. In Belgrade and Kigali, state-controlled media were used by the instigators of genocide to fan the flames of ethnic and religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Today, this dirty work of hate radio and television is being countered by heroic local independent media in the Balkans and Central Africa, which are supported by the US and are communicating messages of reconciliation and broadcasting international war crimes trials.

Active intervention

When early warning and prevention fail, active intervention, including in some cases military intervention, becomes necessary, especially when large numbers of civilians are threatened by imminent human rights catastrophes like genocide.

As the pre-eminent global power, the US has unique moral and political responsibilities in the world. We also have the greatest national interest in international stability. But the US cannot act alone. International--and especially regional--coalitions must play the central role in settling major conflicts, and it is the role of the US to galvanize and support these coalitions. It is axiomatic that the more elements involved in intervening to contain a conflict--whether through the auspices of the UN, through regional organizations like the OAS, the OAU, and the OSCE, or through ad hoc coalitions of the willing--the greater the resources that can be mobilized, the greater the legitimacy of the peacemaking effort, and the greater the likelihood of success.

Several recent success stories have shown this axiom at work, where effective international coalitions have actively intervened to resolve major armed conflicts. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti, for example, the US worked with the UN, the OAS, and regional leaders to build a peace process. Elections in Cambodia were successfully organized and conducted by the UN with regional support. And UN and African leaders effectively brokered the settlement of conflicts and the transition to democracy in Mozambique and Namibia.

But these success stories are overshadowed by the massive failures of early international intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda, the two signature conflicts of the post-Cold War world. Several major lessons stand out from our Bosnia and Rwanda experience:

The first lesson is a stark one: Traditional peacekeeping with limited rules of engagement is completely inadequate when a post-Cold War conflict escalates to genocide. The failure of UN peacekeeping in Bosnia and Rwanda was largely a failure of international will to respond by force to acts of blatant aggression and massive violation of international humanitarian law. By contrast, the US-led multinational force in Haiti and the NATO force in Bosnia were authorized to respond directly to renewed aggression or to violent attacks on civilians. We now know that in these situations intervention requires peacemaking as well as peacekeeping by well-trained forces under rules of engagement that are up to the task. That means we should pay more attention to creating regional stand-by forces and training centers so that rapid responses can be made to conflicts before--not after--they escalate to the genocide of a Bosnia or a Rwanda. That's why NATO in Bosnia, the UN/OAS Coalition in Haiti and the proposed African Crisis Response Force are all important new peace enforcement models which must be developed further and deployed in other places.

The second lesson of our experience with genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia is an equally painful one: We now know that humanitarian relief sometimes can actually fuel a conflict, and that food and refugee assistance without active intervention can be a recipe for disaster. International refugee workers in Rwanda found themselves inadvertently supporting thousands of Hutu genocidists who used their camps to hide and plan further attacks on Tutsis in Rwanda and Zaire; in Bosnia, relief shipments were often easily diverted to support the architects of ongoing ethnic cleansing. Sissela Bok has pointed to this dilemma as one of the central moral crises of post-Cold War humanitarian work, and it is a crisis that can only be resolved by an international commitment to stop genocide, not just deal with its humanitarian consequences.

Finally, we need to define the criteria for international military intervention. I suggest the following as a start: The prospect of success in containing the conflict through intervention should be high, the danger of regional instability if the conflict is not contained should be great, and the likelihood that a massive number of civilian deaths will occur if there is no intervention should be evident. Applying these criteria to real conflicts points toward active military intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Haiti where all these criteria are met, but not, for example, in Tibet or East Timor, where they are not.

Justice & The Rule Of Law

The third major element of an emerging conflict-resolution strategy involves building institutions to promote justice and the rule of law. These fall into two categories: institutions of accountability, whether through formal judicial procedures or formal truth commissions; and institutions of civil society and democratic governance.

The catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda have forced us to take a whole new look at international justice. National reconciliation in the wake of genocide or intense civil conflict is simply impossible without some mechanism or process of accountability. This is true for several reasons: First, those guilty of human rights crimes must be punished or exposed if the victims and their survivors are to be reconciled with their countrymen and with the new governmental authority. I will never forget the tears of anguish I saw from the women of Srebrenica as they pleaded with me for help in obtaining information about their husbands who had mysteriously disappeared. They were not asking for revenge, but they were desperate for the truth.

The passage of time will not by itself wipe away the sense of injustice of the victims. During a recent trip to South Africa, I was impressed by how the crimes of apartheid committed as long as 20 years ago are still fresh on everyone's mind. While visiting the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and talking to the people who testified before it, I gained a vivid picture of the deep wounds left unhealed and the urgency of full exposure to prevent the re-emergence of violent racial conflict. After nearly a year of hearings in all parts of South Africa, I believe the commission has proven to be an effective instrument of both justice and conflict resolution.

Beyond the basic issue of truth, some form of accountability can help remove the stigma of guilt by association, which, if left unaddressed, will merely serve to perpetuate the continuing cycles of violence. Not all, or even most, Serbs, Croats, Hutus, or Afrikaaners were guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity. Affixing individual responsibility is the only way to make that clear. Accountability is also necessary as a warning to others who might be tempted to engage in similar acts in the future.

For all these reasons, the US has been the strongest political and logistical supporter of the UN War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. Both tribunals are up and running. The Yugoslav Tribunal has already rendered several verdicts and begun a process of addressing the most serious crimes against humanity committed in the Balkan conflict. The major challenge which the international community must meet if the tribunal is to be judged a success is to bring about the arrest of all those indicted who remain at large. So long as Radovan Karadzic and scores of other indicted war criminals continue to be free there can be no lasting peace in Bosnia. The Rwanda Tribunal has been more successful in gaining custody of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. Thirteen defendants, including some of the top planners, the leader of the genocide, and the director of Rwanda hate-radio are all now in a UN prison in Tanzania. But the Rwanda Tribunal has been plagued by major administrative problems that have seriously impeded its effectiveness. Both tribunals are struggling to fulfill their missions and maintain their international support but, despite their flaws, I believe they represent the beginnings of an attempt to develop an international legal approach to controlling global disorder.

Of course, accountability does not always require a war crimes trial. The complexity of human rights abuses that we see in different conflicts, and in transitions out of authoritarian rule, defy a one-size-fits-all prescription. Accounting for human rights abuses through national or international "truth commissions" has proven to be an essential part of a number of recent peace processes. In addition to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar efforts have been successful in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Chile, and Argentina.

Truth commissions can provide a forum for victims to record the atrocities committed against them and can provide a means for discrediting those who committed them, especially if it is impractical or impossible to prosecute the perpetrators. To be effective they must be established soon after the resolution of a conflict, and they must move expeditiously and leave a lasting mark on the new political order, with the publication of findings and, where possible, the naming of names of those responsible for atrocities.

Civil Society & Democratic Governance

Accountability is one way in which the rule of law facilitates conflict prevention and resolution. The other way involves building institutions of civil society and democratic governance.

One of the reasons why the Dayton Accords are unique is that they incorporated the creation of domestic human rights institutions into the fabric of the diplomacy ending the armed conflict in Bosnia. The creation of a national human rights commission, an ombudsman, and a national human rights court; the writing of a constitution explicitly incorporating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the requirement that the parties support the international war crimes tribunals--all were ground-breaking innovations in conflict resolution. It is not easy to enforce these provisions--but it is a step in the right direction to have included them in the Dayton Accords.

Over the long-term, the best way to prevent conflict is to build indigenous institutions that foster civil society and promote democratic governance. For this reason, the US and other governments have provided direct assistance to post-conflict countries in areas such as the training of judges and prosecutors, legal exchanges, police training and the administration of justice, and human rights training for the military, so as to create mechanisms of justice and human rights enforcement. Through the work of the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States promotes the emergence of a wide variety of institutions undergirding democracy, including support for electoral assistance and reform, the emergence of free media, free trade unions, the empowerment of women, and the creation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other institutions of civil society.

We have learned at great cost that when the international community fails to enforce the basic norms of international law the result is violence, chaos, and even genocide. It is often said that governments which abuse their citizens with impunity can scarcely be expected to respect the rights and legitimate claims of other countries. History has shown this to be the case time and again, and certainly throughout the 20th century.

It is the rule of law that holds leaders accountable and provides room for civil society and the free flow of information and ideas. Where there is no progress on the rule of law we often see authoritarianism, corruption, and a political regime on the verge of collapse.

On the economic front, the rule of law is an essential guarantor of stable climates for investment and trade. For example, this is why we have stressed that political freedoms and economic freedoms are two sides of the same coin in Hong Kong as it moves toward reversion to Chinese rule.

In the post-Cold War world, security and stability depend more than ever on a society's internal creativity and dynamism, its openness to its neighbors, its ability to cultivate and reward its citizens' human potential, and its ability to enter into and abide by international agreements, not only on trade, but also arms control, the environment, crime control, and other global issues.

Conclusion

Because the United States is an open society with a robust judiciary, a rich civic culture and, with all its flaws, the world's most compelling democracy, it is often hard to explain to the American people why it is important that they should work for the rule of law around the world, and why their tax dollars should support a UN field mission in Rwanda, or help train prosecutors in Ukraine, or fund a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or support a UN treaty-monitoring organization in Geneva. But in the end I am convinced that Americans believe that moral leadership should remain at the heart of our foreign policy. In the case of conflict resolution, they know that our own national interest in international stability dictates that we exercise both our moral and our practical leadership in the world.

What lessons, then, can be learned from our experience in dealing with the new conflicts of the post-Cold War world? I draw three conclusions:

First, the good news--early intervention (for example, in the Baltics or in Macedonia) is far more cost-effective than later intervention (for example, in Bosnia), particularly when it occurs before a conflict has crossed the threshold of sustained armed violence. This is so because the parties are more amenable to intervention at early stages; the costs of peacekeeping and institution-building are far lower; there are fewer political and military risks; and it is less likely that force or sanctions will be needed.

My second conclusion, however, is that it is hard to get the attention of the world in the early stages of a conflict, and often only possible to do so after disaster has occurred. This is so because low-level political conflicts have difficulty competing with real crises for the time of the international community. Here, the role of media is crucial. As many have said, CNN got us into Somalia, and CNN got us out.

My third conclusion is that this points to a "conflict resolution paradox." That is to say, when the parties to conflict are most likely to allow outsiders to help resolve it, the international community is least likely to get engaged, but when the international community gets engaged and intervention becomes more likely, the parties become more resistant. In Bosnia that's why an ounce of prevention in 1992 would have been worth many pounds of cure later on.

But I have a dream that we can overcome this paradox. That dream is to apply what we have learned since the end of the Cold War about the nature of conflicts that have turned to genocide and crimes against humanity, and to build a new international institution to help stop them. What I have in mind is an International Institute for Conflict Resolution. The institute would be based in the UN, and centered regionally; it would draw on the experi-ences of leaders and technicians who have worked successfully to resolve conflicts--for example, in South Africa, the Baltic states, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Namibia; and it would provide a forum for addressing more difficult continuing conflicts--for example, in Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Zaire.

The institute would address three different types of conflicts, each requiring very different strategies: conflicts involving failed states (Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Zaire); conflicts involving divided societies (Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa, Northern Ireland); and conflicts involving classic authoritarian repression (Tibet, East Timor). At the heart of this institute would be a training facility that would integrate the civilian and military aspects of all this work and prepare peacekeepers to operate under a common set of guidelines and rules of engagement. The institute would also serve as a source of support for the institutions of justice and accountability that are such crucial elements of conflict resolution. I envision that the institute would have four regional centers operating under the joint auspices of the UN and the appropriate regional organizations in the Americas, in Africa, in Central Europe, and in East and South Asia.

There could be no more important gift to the 21st century from the bloodiest century in history than a commitment to learn from our failures and mistakes and try to contain conflicts before they turn to genocide. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is no better way to breathe new life into that powerful symbol of the world's collective hopes and dreams than to create an International Institute for Conflict Resolution.

In Montgomery, Alabama there is a monument to all those who have struggled for civil rights in America. It is a simple slab of granite over which flows an eternal stream of water. Inscribed above is Martin Luther King's favorite verse from Isaiah, "Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Before the 20th century ends, we should build a living monument to all those who have struggled for human rights and the resolution of global conflicts, and we should do so in the way best expressed by Vaclav Havel, who is the spiritual father of all that is most promising in our post-Cold War world. Havel put it this way: "I am not an optimist because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure everything ends badly. Instead, I am a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom has meaning . . . and that liberty is always worth the struggle."

John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, delivered the annual Lowell Lecture at Harvard University on Tuesday, May 6, 1997.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, before being called by President Clinton to serve in Washington, Mr. Shattuck was Harvard University Vice President for Government, Community, and Public Affairs. While at Harvard he also was a lecturer at the Harvard Law School and was associated with the Kennedy School of Government's Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program. Prior to joining the Harvard community, he was Executive Director of the Washington Office of the American Civil Liberties Union and the recipient of that organization's highest medal for his contribution to human rights and liberties in the United States. He is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

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